Wednesday, April 10, 2013

Republican Sen. Pat Toomey, from Pennsylvania ,has announced the deal with Virginia Democratic Sen. Joe
Manchin, who holds an A rating from the National Rifle Association. "I don't consider criminal background checks to be gun control. It's just common sense," Toomey said

Nothing angers me more than when someone argues a point that doesn't exist.The accuracy of the following claim varies depending on how you frame it.Greg Abbott Texas Attorney General - "More people killed with hammers & clubs each year than rifles," This is true but can be misleading.

Monday, April 8, 2013

The late Margaret Thatcher like Ronald Reagan would be unelectable in the primary of today's Republican Party, as Think Progress pointed out. Even she realized that capitalism could not solve particular issues such as climate change.

She supported socialized medicine. The
modern-day GOP is so obsessed with trying to repeal Obamacare that
they’ve held nearly 40 votes to do so. But Obamacare is actually a much
more conservative health care policy than the socialized National Health
Service, which Thatcher lauded as an accomplishment of the United
Kingdom. “I believed that the NHS was a service of which we could
genuinely be proud,” she wrote in her book,
“It delivered a high quality of care — especially when it came to acute
illnesses — and at a reasonably modest unit cost, at least compared
with some insurance-based systems.”She increased taxes. Spending actually rose during Thatcher’s first seven years in office, as the New York Times reports,
and taxes took up a larger percentage as share of gross domestic
product. Indeed, even by the end of her time in office taxes were still a
higher percentage of GDP than they were when she arrived:
Thatcher also increased the Value Added Tax (VAT), which Newt Gingrich described as “European socialism” during the 2012 election cycle.She believed in climate change. Thatcher was an early adherent to climate science,
and once warned, “The danger of global warming is as yet unseen but
real enough for us to make changes and sacrifices so that we do not live
at the expense of future generations.” [Think Progress 3/8/13]